French Farmer: 'In 42 Years, I've Never Seen That'

They were destined for the dinner table, but not this way. France's record-setting June heat wave killed an estimated 2.5 million to 3 million birds, the majority of them chickens, in what industry officials called a "historic" die-off, reports the New York Times. On one family farm in northwestern France, Isabelle and Florent Renaudier opened their shed on June 23 to find 1,500 of their free-range birds dead in a matter of hours. Stephane Delapre, a farmer along France's west coast, told AFP late last month that half of his chickens had died of suffocation.

"In 42 years, I've never seen that," he says. Across western poultry regions, carcass collectors have been so overwhelmed that large pickups were temporarily halted, leaving farmers to dig makeshift burial pits in searing temperatures that topped 105 degrees Fahrenheit, per the Times. The episode underscores a growing collision between industrial poultry and a warming climate. Modern broiler chickens, bred to grow fast and stay lean, run hot and can't sweat; even with fans and misters, they struggle once temperatures surge. Similar heat waves in India and the Pacific Northwest have killed millions of birds in recent years.

French farmers are now weighing changes—from tweaking the birds' acccommodations to experimenting with more heat-tolerant breeds—but many say there's no easy fix. "We cannot change poultry," one carcass-collection exec said. "So the only thing is, how do we prepare for the temperatures that will be coming in the next 10 years?" Chickens in the US are experiencing similar fates: Lancaster Farming reports on one Pennsylvania farm that lost 14,000 birds to the recent high temps, after the ventilation system in the farm's chicken house malfunctioned. "Sudden heat onset is the one that really hurts because the animals are not accustomed to it," one poultry educator says.